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What about these:

- all American presidents in the last hundred years have been war criminals, and would have been hanged if judged by the standards of the Nuremberg trials.

- despite what all tabacco company medical studies claim, tabacco causes cancer

- there are no WMDs in Irak, all of the agencies claiming that they have evidence of such are simply lying to our faces

Which of these are dissent and which are disinformation? What do you think your thoughts would have been on them before their truth became public knowledge?

> Disinformation isn't hard to spot. What is hard is to get people to stop spreading it once it is in circulation

These both cannot be true. If disinformation is easy to spot, then not many people will be taken in by it.

I'd venture that certain [generally skeptical?] people find it easy to spot. So, disinfo is easy to spot for someone who makes it their business to spot it. I don't know the ratio of skeptical to credulous in the population, but from recent events it is apparently not great.

Ever wonder what kind of person responds to spam, such that there's an incentive to send spam? I have a friend who regularly asks me, "Hey, what do you think about [insert conspiracy theory]? Pretty crazy world, huh?" Then I ask, "Where did you hear that?" They say, "It's in the news!" I ask, "In the regular news? Or like, InfoWars." They say, "The regular news!" I Google it. The only result is a site even worse than InfoWars. I tell them that site is pure garbage, that the story appears nowhere in mainstream news, and if I can find a debunking I send it to them. This happens, like, biweekly.

This person is a highly educated, extremely intelligent, experienced professional. Not a rube. What's the difference between us? It's not that I'm smart and they're dumb.

If you're motivated enough to believe something, you'll find a way to believe it regardless. If there are smart arguments in favor of what you want to believe, you'll go for them. If those don't exist, you'll seek the next best.

> You often can. Let's try some exercises:

Most of the times most of these things are complete straw men that people claim _others_ believe. And you fell for it. so no you can't.

Exactly. And if you question the covid response you automatically get thrown into these groups. None of these are examples in the article either. It's almost like they didn't read it.

"most" - so which one's aren't? Which ones are? You seem surprisingly confident in declaring the argument wrong yet oddly lethargic to actually explain why.

New responder. First off: I am NOT a free speech libertarian. I've reluctantly come to consider that lies that are believed by 40% of population are de facto facts. We can't so easily just take them off the menu because we "in our wisdom" recognize them for what they are. It will make them more sought after and forbidden. And because we can't ACTUALLY remove them like we used to be able to -- now that we've invented uncensorable internets -- we need new approaches.

I for one set my hopes on tools that augment empathy across wider digital chasms. After all, empathy is the biological "technology" that conscious networks already invented/evolved to stabilize the network. The pattern has been proven a success by virtue of the fact that... civilization worked up til now. We just need to bolt on some things that allow it to work just as well online as it does in meatspace

All imho, of course :) And very kindly stated, with willingness to be wrong

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree if we can not begin to start out from something as axiomatic as what a fact is. A fact is something that is observably true, and no matter how many people believe something that isn't true doesn't make it a fact. It just makes it a wide-spread falsehood.

Democratic institutions and free speech are both great goods and very fragile. They also both have the core capability of destroying the other, which presents us with some considerable difficulties that I do not think will be resolved in my lifetime or that of my children, simply because I do not believe humanity to be mature enough yet to recognize that the powers that divide us are endemic and would need serious attention first if we are to overcome this particular barrier.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Bill Gates really did want to inject poison into people as part of an agenda to bring about a 'new world order'. Obviously he would work very hard to conceal these intentions, so this would not be "observably" true or false by simply reading the newspaper to see whether he has or has not done it yet. You'd be left to draw conclusions from the publicly available facts. Some facts which one might view as supporting the proposition would be a close association with a convicted pedophile sex trafficker who professed eugenic beliefs, a publicly stated desire to reduce the population, or a history of distributing vaccines which caused actual and significant harm in at least one instance. Now, the fact that all these do apply to Bill Gates does not mean the proposition is necessarily true, but I don't see how you can say it's "observably" anything.

This comment exactly illustrates why I don't expect this to be resolved in my lifetime. It is intellectual masturbation around something that should not require any debate at all. Like that lots of bits get spewed every day that ostensibly are some kind of elevated discussion about fine moral points but which in fact just add noise and no signal.

There are very few arguments about observable facts that start with 'for the sake of argument' and then postulate something utterly ridiculous, to engage such an argument would require one to shift ones worldview into the realm of the insane and that just isn't productive.

If you want to postulate that argument you are going to have to come up with some proof, the burden for any kind of argument that is so far out there lies with the one making that argument, it does not lie with the people addressed to dispel it other than out of hand until there is even a whiff of support. That a ridiculous proposition would require other ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it is lack of support.

So, sounds like you're simply convinced it's impossible that it would be true, and therefore no further consideration of any facts is needed. I'd say we've established it's not "observation" at work here.

Now I'm curious what your take is on "There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other" because there's even more smoke around that fire (although of course it's not limited to Democrats).

A more illustrative example than "asbestos causes cancer" from your list would be "asbestos manufacturers are hiding the fact that their product causes cancer." There was a point in time where the conspiracy to conceal asbestos's cancer-causing properties was in a liminal state of knowledge: you couldn't read about it in the New York Times or even initially in scientific journals, but now it's simply a matter of the established record. It's certainly an "insane" idea (company executives explicitly deciding to kill thousands of people rather than endanger their profits), even when contemplated in retrospect. How would this idea have avoided a preemptive dismissal as "disinfo"?

> That a ridiculous proposition would require other ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it is lack of support.

Those other things I pointed out w.r.t. Gates may seem ridiculous, but they are actually true.

Observable facts about Bill Gates do not make fantasy stories that fit those observable facts true.

All your arguments seem to assume that public knowledge is always true and that there are no conspiracies going on. And yet we know from very recent history that potentially world-destroying facts have been deliberately hidden by people in power - tobacco, asbestos, global warming would be some of the largest. If you were to go by mainstream knowledge 20 or 50 years ago, claiming that cigarettes cause cancer and tabacco companies know about it and are paying doctors to hide it from everyone would have seemed like utter lunacy. Or claiming that our use of fossil fuels is likely to cause huge areas of the planet to become uninhabitable, oil companies know about it and are paying good money to keep it hidden. Or that there are no weapons of mass destructionin Irak and our intelligence agencies and government just made that up as an excuse to invade.

That's of course not to say that fringe beliefs MUST be rigt, of course. But if I claim that it's obvious Epstein was murdered,am I spreading disinformation or am I dissenting? If I claim mRNA vaccines are potentially dangerous and that we can't just trust the clinical trials?

It's sometimes easy to sort fact from fiction with hindsight. There are certain facts that can be discounted as disinformation on the face of it. But it's very hard to entrust anyone with such power.

For an example of how this is dangerous, just look at how hard it is to criticize the state of Israel and its actions without being labeled an anti-semite (or a 'self-hating jew' if you are Jewish). This is an excellent example of how dissent in proximity to disinformation can easily get swallowed along. Bill Gates is not trying to poison us with 5G, but if people start removing such facts, they may also start removing posts that accuse Bill Gates of using his money and influence to pressure states into trying his experiments, e.g. with his disastrous ideas about education in the US.

I summarized some of the arguments here:

https://en.arguman.org/the-war-on-disinformation-is-a-war-on...

trailing slash gives a 404

First off, I appreciate your comment.

As a mild defense, I'm just worried that the internet (and emerging distributed web) might make for a landscape where facts no longer are predisposed to win, as they were in the very carefully calibrated prior social systems. There are no chokepoints as there have been through all prior history, where power could exert control, be that through kings, politicians, media, capital, overton window, or whatever.

The tactics of persisting signals in a sea of liquid and a sea of air are different. Maybe we're in a different phase. I'm willing (though not welcoming) toward the idea of this being a phase change, after which it's not particularly helpful to focus on the "rightfulness" of factual information.

I'm not saying there is no role for facts, I'm saying we might have to start thinking differently about how we expect the larger systems to integrate them

EDIT: For example, removing Trump (the liar in chief) from Twitter has UNDOUBTEDLY improved public discourse imho. I wish we'd done it sooner. But we're actively building a world where that will be less and less possible. And while removing his lying megaphone improved things for a bit, we sure as heck haven't figured out the right way to deal with a Trump anomaly without that lever.

What will we do in a digital regime where the mathematical guarantees and data structures at their core prevent us from silencing him? To what authority will we negotiate about "truth"?

For most of human history, facts were not "predisposed to win." AFAICT, it was the invention of the camera, microphone and development of crime scene evidence that gave us about 100 golden years where facts were harder to fake than verify.

Not everyone agrees that a fact must be observably true. How about:

8) God is the One True God and Jesus Christ is His Son.

Depending on the year you use to measure, ~65% of Americans believe this. It is a "fact" in the GP's sense of the word. So much so, that we have actual laws that derive from the chain of conclusions that stem from it. These laws arose under the normal processes of democratic institutions and free speech. When something is believed by the majority of people, it becomes a de facto fact.

Your example is not a “fact” in the sense of Christian cannon / dogma. What you are referring to is an article of faith. Faith is belief in something that cannot observed or proven to be true.

The distinction between faith and fact is an important tenet of Christianity.

And that's exactly the problem right there.

Islamists and Christians will disagree on this because they feel that 'their set of facts' is the one true set.

But the fact is: both of these positions have very poor support, which is why theology is not a branch of science. That a lot of people believe this and that those people can subvert democracy to give their 'alternative realities' preferential treatment is one of the major reasons most forms of government try hard to keep religion out of government. This usually doesn't succeed 100% but at least they recognize that there is something not ok about this.

Hey, did you ever read Robert Anton Wilson's "Quantum Psychology"? I could be off-base but I think you'd really like it.

I haven't thank you for the pointer, on the reading list.

> Islamists and Christians

Islamist:Islam::Dominionist: Christianity

not

Islamist:Islam::Christian::Christianity

>3) There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other

This will not age well.